Saturday, July 05, 2003


espresso, pizza, curtains of fire that reveal the soul

naturally, here at bccy we spent the holiday eating pizza and watching the fireworks from our roof.

i'll never understand the people who leave new york for holidays. that's when new york is at its best! the town is empty and becomes the scenery for your private theater.

once upon a time i was driving on a beautiful summer's evening through a warehouse-y part of queens, a corner of long island city.

it was a warm but pleasant, slightly hazy evening, with a distant moon. the streetlights, headlights, and dim moonlight caught the corners of the warehouses at the mortar's white seams.

the mortar sparkled gently, so that every ugly squat building with an overflowing dumpster suddenly was ruled with quietly pearlescing patterns of light.

it was subtle, and lovely, and i couldn't help remarking on its beauty. the driver of the car treated me in scorn: "this is horrible!"

what do you do with people like this? at that moment the true nature of new york shone out, but they couldn't see it. this is heart-breaking when it happens. i wanted to grab the driver's hand and never let it go, hold it tight and will them to see all the beauty there was.

but they are driving; how can you do that? to pull the hand off the stylish german wheel. . .the secret bliss of everything is suddenly revealed and yet you cannot say a word about it. you cannot redirect attention to it. . .

when the champagne-silver fireworks hang like burning curtains over wall street, then the beauty of new york is easy to see. but new york is always present, at any moment in any light the numinous is ready to peek out at you.

of course, the pizza always helps. earlier i spoke of my new flour mix for the crust, and here it is, by weight as usual:

7.5 oz. first clear flour
3.25 oz. durum wheat flour
4 oz. king arthur's sir lancelot high-gluten flour
9 oz. water
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon saf yeast
1 tablespoon olive oil (optional)

this results in a dough with 61-2% hydration.

(yesterday was quite humid, so that should probably be noted and maybe count for "extra" water as i'm sure the flour was absorbing moisture from the air; so if 9 oz doesn't give you slightly slack, tacky, sleek supple dough due to dry conditions on the day you try, maybe add a touch mo' water. . . what do i mean by tacky? the kneaded dough clung a bit to the side of the kitchen aid mixer bowl, but didn't stick like glue to the hands. . .)

then i went on with my usual process. it was 95 degrees and so humid -- perfect weather for the yeast. the dough rose quickly for me -- 1-1/2 hrs.

but mr. right thought this was the best crust ever. after baking on parchment on the pizza stone at 450 degrees for 8 minutes, he tossed his back in straight on the stone for another 30 seconds, just to give the thinnest layer of extra crunch to the crust.

meanwhile i was sniffing every jar of herb and spice in house (quite a few!) in an effort to more closely describe the fragrance of don schoenholdt's gillies just-for-me espresso.

it was sort of like the ground coriander i get from sahadi's, but with an, um, roasty thing happening, and it was kind of like the chinese 5-spice powder but without the overwhelming sweetness of the cinnamon.

what i needed was a descriptor for a barely sweet, roasty, dark molasses-y, fennel/licorice/anise thing. so i settled on that hard black dutch licorice. you know what i mean.

thus i ate pizza and watched the fireworks with turmeric spotted along the ridge of my nose. no wonder the people in my building refuse to talk to me in the elevator...

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